Sample Chapter

Chapter One

The Beach

* * *

September 8, 1900

THROUGHOUT THE NIGHT of Friday, September 7, 1900, Isaac Monroe
Cline found himself waking to a persistent sense of something gone
wrong. It was the kind of feeling parents often experienced and one that
no doubt had come to him when each of his three daughters was a baby.
Each would cry, of course, and often for astounding lengths of time,
tearing a seam not just through the Cline house but also, in that day of
open windows and unlocked doors, through the dew-sequined peace of
his entire neighborhood. On some nights, however, the children cried
only long enough to wake him, and he would lie there heart-struck,
wondering what had brought him back to the world at such an unaccustomed
hour. Tonight that feeling returned.

Most other nights, Isaac slept soundly. He was a creature of the last
turning of the centuries when sleep seemed to come more easily. Things
were clear to him. He was loyal, a believer in dignity, honor, and effort.
He taught Sunday school. He paid cash, a fact noted in a directory published
by the Giles Mercantile Agency and meant to be held in strictest
confidence. The small red book fit into a vest pocket and listed nearly all
Galveston's established citizensits police officers, bankers, waiters,
clerics, tobacconists, undertakers, tycoons, and shipping agentsand
rated them for credit-worthiness, basing this appraisal on secret reports
filed anonymously by friends and enemies. An asterisk beside a name
meant trouble, "Inquire at Office," and marred the fiscal reputations of
such people as Joe Amando, tamale vendor; Noah Allen, attorney; Ida
Cherry, widow; and August Rollfing, housepainter. Isaac Cline got the
highest rating, a "B," for "Pays Well, Worthy of Credit." In November of
1893, two years after Isaac arrived in Galveston to open the Texas Section
of the new U.S. Weather Bureau, a government inspector wrote: "I
suppose there is not a man in the Service on Station Duty who does
more real work than he.... He takes a remarkable degree of interest in
his work, and has a great pride in making his station one of the best and
most important in the country, as it is now."

Upon first meeting Isaac, men found him to be modest and self-effacing,
but those who came to know him well saw a hardness and confidence
that verged on conceit. A New Orleans photographer captured
this aspect in a photograph that is so good, with so much attention to
the geometries of composition and light, it could be a portrait in oil. The
background is black; Isaac's suit is black. His shirt is the color of
bleached bone. He has a mustache and goatee and wears a straw hat, not
the rigid cake-plate variety, but one with a sweeping scimitar brim that
imparts to him the look of a French painter or riverboat gambler. A
darkness suffuses the photograph. The brim shadows the top of his
face. His eyes gleam from the darkness. Most striking is the careful positioning
of his hands. His right rests in his lap, gripping what could be a
pair of gloves. His left is positioned in midair so that the diamond on his
pinkie sparks with the intensity of a star.

There is a secret embedded in this photograph. For now, however,
suffice it to say the portrait suggests vanity, that Isaac was aware of himself
and how he moved through the day, and saw himself as something
bigger than a mere recorder of rainfall and temperature. He was a scientist,
not some farmer who gauged the weather by aches in a rheumatoid
knee. Isaac personally had encountered and explained some of the
strangest atmospheric phenomena a weatherman could ever hope to
experience, but also had read the works of the most celebrated meteorologists
and physical geographers of the nineteenth century, men like
Henry Piddington, Matthew Fontaine Maury, William Redfield, and
James Espy, and he had followed their celebrated hunt for the Law of
Storms. He believed deeply that he understood it all.

He lived in a big time, astride the changing centuries. The frontier
was still a living, vivid thing, with Buffalo Bill Cody touring his Wild
West Show to sellout crowds around the globe, Bat Masterson a sportswriter
in New Jersey, and Frank James opening the family ranch for
tours at fifty cents a head. But a new America was emerging, one with
big and global aspirations. Teddy Roosevelt, flanked by his Rough Riders,
campaigned for the vice presidency. U.S. warships steamed to quell
the Boxers. There was fabulous talk of a great American-built canal that
would link the Atlantic to the Pacific, a task at which Vicomte de
Lesseps and the French had so catastrophically failed. The nation in
1900 was swollen with pride and technological confidence. It was a
time, wrote Sen. Chauncey Depew, one of the most prominent politicians
of the age, when the average American felt "four-hundred-percent
bigger" than the year before.

There was talk even of controlling the weatherof subduing hail
with cannon blasts and igniting forest fires to bring rain.

In this new age, nature itself seemed no great obstacle.

ISAAC'S WIFE, CORA, lay beside him. She was pregnant with their fourth
child and the pregnancy had entered a difficult stretch, but now she
slept peacefully, her abdomen a pale island against the darkness.

The heat no doubt contributed to Isaac's sleeplessness. It had been
a problem all week, in fact all summer, especially for Cora, whose
pregnancy had transformed her body into a furnace. Temperatures in
Galveston had risen steadily since Tuesday. The heat broke 90 degrees
on Thursday, and hit 90 again on Friday. Moisture from weeks of heavy
rain concentrated in the air until the humidity was unbearable. Earlier
that week Isaac had read in the Galveston News how a heat wave in
Chicago had killed at least three people. Even the northernmost latitudes
were experiencing unusual levels of warmth. For the first time in
recorded history, the Bering Glacier in what eventually would become
Alaska had begun to shrink, sprouting rivers, calving icebergs, and ultimately
shedding six hundred feet of its depth. A correspondent for The
Western World magazine wrote, "The summer of 1900 will be long
remembered as one of the most remarkable for sustained high temperature
that has been experienced for almost a generation."

The prolonged heat had warmed the waters of the Gulf to the temperature
of a bath, a not-unhappy condition for the thousands of new
immigrants just arrived from Europe at the Port of Galveston, known to
many as the Western Ellis Island. Some camped now on the beach near
the Army's new gun emplacements, steeling themselves for the long
journey north to open land and the riches promised them by railroads
intent on populating America's vast undeveloped prairie. In a pamphlet
called Home Seekers, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe described the
lush land of the Texas coast as "waiting to be tickled into a laughing harvest."
The railroad come-ons painted Texas as a paradise of benign
weather, when in fact hurricanes scoured its coast, plumes of hot wind
baked apples in its trees, and "blue northers" could drop the temperature
fifty degrees in a matter of minutes. To Isaac, such quirks of weather
were a fascination, and not just because he happened to be the chief
weatherman in Texas. He was also a physician. He no longer saw
patients, but had become a pioneer in medical climatology, the study of
how weather affects people, and in this carried forth a tradition laid
down by Hippocrates, who believed climate determined the character
of men and nations.

Hippocrates advised any physician arriving in an unfamiliar town to
first "examine its position with respect to the winds."

* * *

AS FRIDAY NIGHT ebbed into Saturday, the air at last cooled. The sudden
change in temperature would come as a delightful surprise to others in
Galveston, but to Isaac it was one more flicker of trouble.

He let his mind wander through the house. He heard no sound from
the children's bedrooms. His eldest daughter, Allie May, was now
twelve; his middle daughter, Rosemary, was eleven. His youngest,
Esther Bellew, was six, but he still called her his baby. He heard nothing
also from his brother, Joseph, who lived in the house. Eight years earlier,
Joseph had come to work for Isaac as an assistant observer. The two
men were still close, but soon any tie between them would be severed
for all time and each would pass the remainder of his life as if the other
never existed. Joseph was twenty-nine. Isaac was thirty-eight.

Isaac's house stood at 2511 Avenue Q, just three blocks north of the
Gulf. It was four years old and replaced a previous house that had
burned in a fire in November 1896. Isaac had ordered this house built
atop a forest of stilts with the explicit goal of making it impervious to the
worst storms the Gulf could deliver. It had two stories, with porches or
"galleries" off each floor in the front and rear, and a small building in the
backyard that served as a stable. The house was ideally situated. On Sundays
Isaac and his family would join the torrent of other families walking
down 25th Street toward the big Victorian bathhouses built over the
Gulf. Sometimes they walked to Murdoch's; other days they chose the
Pagoda Company Bath House, with its two large octagonal pavilions and
sloping pagoda roofs. The Clines reached it by walking the length of a
250-foot boardwalk that began at the foot of 24th Street, rose 16 vertical
feet above the beach, and ran another 110 feet out over the waves, as if its
builders believed they had conquered the sea for once and for all. An
electric wire ran to a pole far out in the surf, where it powered a lamp
suspended over the water. At night bathers gathered like insects.

Isaac heard the usual sounds that sleeping houses make, even houses
as strong as his. He heard the creaking and sighing of beams, posts, and
joists as the relatively new lumber of his home absorbed the moisture of
the night and released the last heat of day. He heard the susurrus of curtains
luffed by the breeze. There would have been mice, too, and mosquitoes.
If people sought to protect themselves at all, they propped tents
of fine, gauzelike netting over their beds. No one had window screens.

As Isaac listened, background noises came forward. One noise in
particular. It was more than noise, really. If Isaac lay very still, he could
feel the shock waves climb the stilts of his house, the same way he felt the
vibration of the pipe organ Cora played at church each Sunday. To children
in houses all along the beach, particularly the ninety-three children
in the big, sad St. Mary's Orphanage two miles west at the very edge of
the sea, the sound was a delight. They heard it and felt it and dreamed it.
To some, each shock wave was the concussion of British artillery in the
Boer War or a ghost gun from the dead Maine, or perhaps the thud of an
approaching giant. A welcome giant. The shuddering ground promised
a delightful departure from the steamy sameness of Galveston's summers,
and it came with exquisite timing: Saturday. Only hours ahead lay
Saturday night, the most delicious night of all.

But the sound frightened Isaac. The thudding, he knew, was caused
by great deep-ocean swells falling upon the beach. Most days the Gulf
was as placid as a big lake, with surf that did not crash but rather wore
itself away on the sand. The first swells had arrived Friday. Now the
booming was louder and heavier, each concussion more profound.

ISAAC WOKE AGAIN AT 4:00 A.M., but this time the cause was obvious. His
brother stood outside the bedroom door tapping gently and calling his
name.

Joseph too had been unable to sleep. Not a terribly creative man, he
described this feeling as a sense of "impending disaster." He had stayed
up until midnight recording weather observations from a bank of
instruments mounted on the roof of the Levy Building, a four-story brick
building in the heart of Galveston's commercial district. The barometers
had captured only a slight decrease in pressure. The anemometer,
which caught the wind in cups mounted at opposite ends of crossed
metal bars, recorded wind speeds of eleven to nineteen miles an hour. It
was capable of measuring velocities as high as one hundred miles an
hour, but conditions had never come close to testing this capacity, nor
did any rational soul believe they ever would. Throughout Friday afternoon
and evening, a peculiar oppressiveness had settled over the city.
Temperatures remained high well into the night.

None of these observations was enough by itself to raise concern. For
days, however, Isaac had been receiving cables from the Weather
Bureau's Central Office in Washington describing a storm apparently of
tropical origin that had drenched Cuba. Although Isaac did not know it,
there was confusion about the storm's true course, debate as to its character.
The bureau's men in Cuba said the storm was nothing to worry
about; Cuba's own weather observers, who had pioneered hurricane
detection, disagreed. Conflict between both groups had grown increasingly
intense, an effect of the unending campaign of Willis Moore, chief
of the U.S. Weather Bureau, to exert ever more centralized control over
forecasting and the issuance of storm warnings. The bureau had long
banned the use of the word tornado because it induced panic, and panic
brought criticism, something the bureau could ill afford. Earlier that
week, Moore had sent Galveston a telegram asserting yet again that only
headquarters could issue storm warnings.

At 11:30 A.M. on Friday, Moore had sent another telegram, this one
notifying Isaac and other observers of a tropical storm centered in the
Gulf of Mexico south of Louisiana, "moving slowly northwest." The
telegram predicted "high northerly winds tonight and Saturday with
probably heavy rain."

Again, nothing especially worrisome. Tropical storms came ashore
every summer. They brought wind and rain, even some flooding. Damage
was rare. No one got hurt. But in one respect the telegram did
surprise Isaac. Until now, Moore's cables had expressed absolute confidence
the storm was moving north toward the Atlantic coast.

Isaac got out of bed, careful not to wake Cora. Joseph's intrusion
annoyed him. There was tension between the brothers. Nothing openat
least not yet. Just a persistent low-grade rivalry.

He and Joseph descended to the kitchen, careful to avoid waking the
children, and there by sheer force of habit Isaac put on a pot of coffee.
They talked about the weather. A familiar dynamic emerged. Joseph, as
the younger brother and junior employee eager to prove himself, made
the case too strongly that something peculiar was happening and that
Washington must be informed. Isaac, ever confident, told Joseph to get
some sleep, that he would take over and assess the situation and if necessary
telegraph his findings to headquarters.

Isaac dressed. He stepped out onto the first-floor porch. With most
of the block that faced him across Avenue Q still undeveloped, he had
an unobstructed view of the sky and the cityscape to the north. He saw
lime-washed bungalows and elaborate three-story homes with gables,
bays, and cupolas, and just beyond these the big Rosenberg Women's
Home and the Bath Avenue Public School. At the corner, to his right
and across the street, stood the three-story home of the Neville family,
windows open, dew and drizzle darkening its intricate slate roof. Ever
since the great fire of 1885, Galveston had required that roofs be shingled
with slate instead of wood as a safety precaution, but in just a few
hours the shingles from the Neville house, Isaac's house, and thousands
of others throughout Galveston would begin whirling through the air
with an effect that evoked for many older residents the gore-filled afternoons
they spent at Chancellorsville and Antietam.

Isaac harnessed his horse to a small two-wheeled sulky that he used
mostly when hunting and with a gentle click of the reins set out for the
beach three blocks south.

IT WAS A GORGEOUS MORNING, the breeze soft and suffused with mist, jasmine,
and oleander. Stratus and cumulus clouds filled most of the sky,
some bellying almost to the sea, but Isaac also saw patches of dawn blue
rimmed with cloudsmoke. To his left, behind the clouds, the sun had
begun to rise and at odd moments it turned the clouds orange-gray, like
fire behind smoke. Seagulls hung in threes at fixed points in the sky
where they rode head-on into the unaccustomed north wind, wing tips
flinching for purchase. The wheels of Isaac's sulky broadcast a reassuring
crunch as they moved over the pavement of crushed oyster shells.

By now the most industrious children were rising to do their chores
and get them out of the way so they could go to the beach as early as possible.
Everyone reveled in the refreshing coolness. Rabbi Henry Cohen
was awake and preparing for Saturday's services. Dr. Samuel O. Young,
an amateur meteorologist and secretary of the Galveston Cotton
Exchange, was having breakfast and planning his own early-morning
trip to the beach. At 18th Street and Avenue O 1/2, in a small two-story
rental house, Louisa Rollfing made breakfast for her husband, August,
who was due downtown that morning to continue the painting of a commercial
building. Louisa looked out the window and as always felt just a
hint of disappointment, or maybe sorrow, for although she liked Galveston,
she still was not used to the landscape. To her, palms and live
oak did not qualify as trees. She missed the great green-black forests of
her childhood home in Germany with trees "so old and large, that in
some places it is almost dark in daytime."

Visitors approaching Galveston from the sea saw it as a brilliant
swath of light between sea and sky, like mercury floating on a deep blue
plain. In the summer of 1900, a boy named John W. Thomason Jr.later
to become a well-known writer of military historyarrived to
spend his vacation with his grandfather in a cottage off Broadway, half a
dozen blocks from Isaac Cline's office. "The Gulf breeze cooled the city
at nightfall; one of the most beautiful beaches in the world offered
delightful surf-bathing; and you saw everybody there in the afternoons,
bathing, promenading or driving in carriages on the smooth, crisp
sands." He left town on Saturday, September 1, exactly a week before
Isaac's trip to the beach, very sad to leave. He looked back with longing
as his train clicked over the long wooden trestle to the mainland and his
newfound friends receded into the steam rising from Galveston Bay.
"That city as it was," he wrote, "I never saw again, nor some of the boys
and girls I knew there."

Where critics most faulted Galveston was for its lack of geophysical
presence. The city occupied a long, narrow island that also formed the
southern boundary of Galveston Bay, spanned by three railroad trestles
and a wagon bridge. Its highest point, on Broadway, was 8.7 feet above
sea level; its average altitude was half that, so low that with each one-foot
increase in tide, the city lost a thousand feet of beach. Josiah Gregg, one
of America's most celebrated traveler-raconteurs, wrote in his diary in
November 1841 of hearing about a past flood in which "this island was
so completely overflowed that a small vessel actually sailed out over the
middle of it." He did not believe the story. He could see, however, that
someday flooding might "even endanger lives."

Regardless of one's view, the fact was that Galveston in 1900 stood
on the verge of greatness. If things continued as they were, Galveston
soon would achieve the stature of New Orleans, Baltimore, or San Francisco.
The New York Herald had already dubbed the city the New York
of the Gulf. But city leaders also knew there was only room on the Texas
coast for one great city, and that they were in a winner-take-all race
against Houston, just fifty miles to the north. As of 1900, Galveston had
the lead. The year before, it had become the biggest cotton port in the
country and the third-busiest port overall. Forty-five steamship lines
served the city, among them the White Star Line, which provided service
between Galveston and Europe and in just over a decade would
lose a great ship to hubris and ice. Consulates in the city represented
sixteen countries, including Russia and Japan. And Galveston's population
was growing fast. On Friday, September 7, Isaac had read in the
News the first brief report on the Galveston count of the 1900 census,
which found that the city had grown 30 percent in only ten years.

Galveston now had electric streetcars, electric lights, local and
long-distance telephone service, two domestic telegraph companies, three big
concert halls, and twenty hotels, the most elegant being the Tremont,
south of Isaac's office, with two hundred ocean-facing rooms, fifty "elegant"
rooms with private baths, and its own electric-power plant.

What most marked the city was money. As early as 1857 Galveston
had achieved a reputation as a cosmopolitan town with a passion for fine
things. One of its French chefs distinguished himself with a fusion of
frontier and Continental cuisine that featured "beefsteak goddam a la
mode." By 1900, the city was reputed to have more millionaires per
square mile than Newport, Rhode Island. Much of their money was
vividly on display in the ornate mansions and lush gardens of Broadway,
the city's premier street.

The city offered everything from sex to sacks of Tidal Wave Flour.
For the grieving rich, the giant livery and funeral works of J. Levy and
Brothers offered a very special option: "A child's white hearse and harness,
with white horses."

WINDOWS WERE OPEN in all the houses Isaac passed, and this imparted
to the city an aura of vulnerability. Suddenly the noise of the sulky's
wheels seemed more jarring than reassuring. Ordinarily the great bathhouses
at the end of the street would have brightened Isaac's mood, but
today they looked swollen and worn; they floated on cushions of greenish
mist like castles from the mind of Poe.

Isaac drove until he had a clear view of the Gulf, then stopped the
sulky. He stood, pulled out his watch, and began timing the long hills of
water that rolled toward the beach. The crests of the waves were brown
with sand, but on the surface between crests the spindrift laid intricate
patterns of shocking-white lace.

Isaac knew the low-pressure center of the storm had to be somewhere
off to his left, out in the Gulf. It was a fundamental tenet of marine
navigation, one he explained during a lecture at the Galveston YMCA on a
Saturday evening in 1891. Large crowds gathered for such talks. They
consumed the spoken word the way later men would consume television.
In the northern hemisphere, Isaac told his audience, the winds of
tropical cyclones always move counterclockwise around a central area of
low pressure. "Stand with your back to the wind," he said, "and the
barometer will be lower on your left than on your right."

The swells came very slowly, at intervals of one to five minutes. To lay
observers, this slow pace might have seemed reassuring. In fact, the
slowness made the swells far more ominous, a principle Isaac only
vaguely understood. Many years later he would write, "If we had known
then what we know now of these swells, and the tides they create, we
would have known earlier the terrors of the storm which these
swells ... told us in unerring language was coming."

ISAAC TURNED his sulky around and headed back toward his office. The
breeze was now head-on and ruffled the mane of his horse. The oyster-shell
paving gave way to heavy wooden blocks and these imparted to the
sulky a beat like that of a swiftly moving train. The north wind brought
Isaac the perfume of a waking city: the clean, almost minty, smell of
freshly cut lumber from the Hildenbrand planing mill; coffee from the
bulk roasters in the alley between Mechanic and Market; and always,
everywhere, the scent of horses.

At the Levy Building, Isaac walked the three flights to the bureau,
stopped inside for a moment, then continued up to the roof. To the east
and south he saw the sea; to the west, the spires of St. Patrick's Church,
still under construction. The bureau's storm flag, a single crimson
square with a smaller black square at its center, rippled from a tower.

The barometer showed that atmospheric pressure had fallen only
slightly from the night before. "Only one-tenth of an inch lower," Isaac
said.

Nothing in the sky, the instruments, or the cables from Washington
indicated a storm of much intensity. "The usual signs which herald the
approach of hurricanes were not present in this case," he said. "The
brick-dust sky was not in evidence in the smallest degree."

Even so, the day felt wrong. Ordinarily, offshore winds kept the surf
and tides down, but now, despite the brisk north wind, both the surf and
tide were rising. It was a pattern new to Isaac.

He drove his sulky back to the beach. He again timed the swells. He
noted their shape, their color, the arc they produced as they mounted
the sand. They were heavier now and pushed seawater onto the streets
closest to the beach.

Isaac returned to his office and composed a telegram to the Central
Office in Washington. He ended the telegram: "Such high water with
opposing winds never observed previously."

Isaac's concern was tempered by his belief that no storm could do
serious damage to Galveston. He had concluded this on the basis of his
own analysis of the unique geography of the Gulf and how it shaped the
region's weather. In 1891, in the wake of a tropical storm that Galveston
weathered handily, the editors of the Galveston News invited Isaac to
appraise the city's vulnerability to extreme weather. Isaac, father of
three, husband, lover, scientist, and creature of the new heroic American
age, wrote: "The opinion held by some who are unacquainted with the
actual conditions of things, that Galveston will at some time be seriously
damaged by some such disturbance, is simply an absurd delusion."

At the top of the Levy Building the anemometer spun. The wind vane
shifted ever so slightly. The self-recording barometer etched another
tiny decline.

FAR OUT TO SEA, one hundred miles from where Isaac stood, Capt. J. W.
Simmons, master of the steamship Pensacola, prayed softly to himself as
horizontal spheres of rain exploded against the bridge with such force
they luminesced in a billion pinpoints of light, like fireworks in a green-black
sky.

He had stumbled into the deadliest storm ever to target America.
Within the next twenty-four hours, eight thousand men, women, and
children in the city of Galveston would lose their lives. The city itself
would lose its future. Isaac would suffer an unbearable loss. And he
would wonder always if some of the blame did not belong to him.

This is the story of Isaac and his time in America, the last turning of
the centuries, when the hubris of men led them to believe they could
disregard even nature itself.
(Continues...)